Life is supposedly a bleak unjust affair but then the incredible Chiara Grassia asks you to write songs for her You Are Here project which is a tribute show for a legendary 80s Canberra Indie Band that never actually existed. And then the band turns out to be made up of some of the coolest and best and loveliest musicians there are (including members of some of you favorite acts like No Stars, Agency Pocket Fox and Petre Out). And then you get to go full method on imagining the entire life and death of your favorite Canberra cult band that never was and attempting to write the parallel-universe indie-guitar classics that you’ve always wanted to exist. And then you show up to the first meeting and the band have written their own songs and they’re perfect and amazing and you realize you aren’t needed at all, but they still want to use a couple of your songs on the set. And then the gig happens and you’re in the crowd and your songs sound just like you imagined but 12 times better plus the songs that the others wrote are your new favorite songs and Nikki H made great music videos for each song and best of all at least some of the crowd are convinced that Slush Pile was actually a real band and the gig goes great and the tribute band (named Plush Style) are keen to make a record of the songs and sure maybe my life is a crazy miracle dream whatever.

It’s 9.55pm on the Friday night of You Are Here Festival, and I’m moving in choreographed sync with microwave cooking guru/internet sensation Amelia de Frost on a stage littered with popcorn and backlit by LED-laden microwaves. Amelia and I are listless in our movements, three hours of literally non-stop Wellness-themed activity has left us shattered. The crowd have been watching us, transfixed by our agony and growing steadily that whole time. The crowd knows that in mere moments the participatory section that they have joined in on 9 times already will occur one final time. Their joy and support sweeps over us and our energy crests one more time as we lead them into a New Wellness Tomorrow. In that moment, as for the whole night, I am Babyfreeze.

I am a precious flower as far as the projects I agree to do. Claire Granata is one of my best friends and also one of the most skilled performers I know, but when she first floated the idea of combining her brilliant Amelia de Frost character with my Babyfreeze persona in an aerobics-themed show I was meh on it. I LOVE dancing (and Claire and I share a certain aggressively athletic approach to doing so) but ‘aerobics’ as a premise seemed thin and I didn’t want to do anything that was just a joke.

Luckily I am as pretentious as I am precious and I have a couple of simple buttons that any potential collaborator can push. The first button was pushed when Claire suggested a celebrity infomercial-type format, and I realised that I could use this piece as a vehicle to dump all of the venom I’ve built up from 7 years of working in the fitness industry. That’s when it became Aerobicide: Feel Better, a vaguely-defined Wellness System through which we could throw shade on basically anything that’s ever price-tagged the idea of better health.

The final trap was sprung when You Are Here producer Rochelle White pointed out that this obviously had to be a 3-hour-long durational performance. I am an absolute sucker for the idea of physical and logistical ordeal as the heart of an artwork, and Claire is similarly fucked in the head, so in a moment we were excitedly committed to what became a three-month campaign of past-midnight rehearsals and teaser video shoots.

Claire brought most of the actual necessary skills to the table, choreographing a full 20 -minute routine (with me interjecting the odd goofy gym move) set to a sublimely-poptacular music mix by go-to sound genius Reuben Ingall. This mix provided the structure of the Aerobicide presentation, a punishing demonstration of the extreme wellness of (celebrity spokespeople) Amelia de Frost and Babyfreeze that was repeated 9 times back to back in the final performance. Rather than speaking live we had ourselves spouting dozens of fitness-based non-sequitur slogans as part of the recorded track. Our past selves therefore stayed immortally sunny and smug as our Live Selves slowly realised that they were trapped in a never-ending loop of Activeness.

The other vital components of the show were Adam Thomas’ incredible set design (comprising 9 separate microwaves all with their own individual lighting effects) and the tireless efforts of Holly Tranter and Matt Lustri as our Coach/Assistants, whose multifarious duties included changing our costumes live on stage 9 times across the night.

The whole thing happened at You Are Here’s Electric Avenues, a great big night-festival in Haig park. We were set up on a stage near the food trucks and I was sure people were going to interact with us like a telethon-type thing, checking in with us every now and then across the night. I was wrong. A huge amount of people camped out to see us repeat the same sequence again and again, descending further into madness each time. The bludgeoning nature of the central gag, where every time we think we’ve finally finished and then the music starts up again, got a louder cheer every time. Frankly I’ve never been involved in an artwork that the audience took to as ideally and perfectly as this one. As Claire and I finally shuffled off the stage at 10pm, taking care to walk in a shell-shocked slow motion, the crowd took up a chant of ‘THREE MORE HOURS! THREE MORE HOURS! THREE MORE HOURS!’

Photos by the wonderful Sarah Walker.

The joy of Canberra Fringe is that it’s an underfunded, shambling zombie echo of what, even in it’s heyday, was an underthought, slackly-curated private party for Canberra’s sketchier creative scenes. It’s been sustained years past its’ natural death by the efforts of top-notch local producers who have gotten too adept at creating miraculously good mini-festivals on insultingly low budgets. PROM is a Good Indie Pop Band that has spent years pressing on with pub gigs, recordings, stage musicals and weird performance art parties despite line-up changes, inconsistent levels of focus from the ostensible ‘band leader’ (me) and the ever-nagging awareness that we are no-one’s favorite band.

I love PROM and I love Canberra Fringe. Both are sensibly doomed in the long term. One playing inside the other seemed timely and appropriate. Really it seemed poetic but I’m not going to say that.

We played really fucking well, and tested out some narrative and persona stuff for what will be our next big PROM show. We’ll have to do it soon before Chris moves to Scotland. These are the kind of stakes that I appreciate, more and more. Photos by Adam Thomas.

As you Guys know I always prefer art to be a competition. Just one reason that I get along so well with the guys from Finnigan and Brother, and when they challenged me to take part in a Christmas Single competition (alongside some of my favorite members of the ACT Musical Diaspora) I lept at the chance to add Christmas to the list of things that I could compete in.

The above playlist has all of the entries. Finnigan and Brother’s drop a warm-hearted anthropological ragga primer for the suburban Australian Christmas. Julia Johnson and Reuben Ingall weaponise their childhood memories for a tactical assault on your heart. The Norah Jones Half Hour drop the best ending of any track I heard in 2016. Sallow doesn’t care about your precious illusions. Double Infinite Peace are the supergroup who formed just to win this competition, but were probably trumped by the last-minute reformation of rap-based internet monopoly The Landlords. Then there’s my entry, Merry Christmas (LCD) where I easily created a unifying theory for the whole of 2016 and made it rhyme. Not that I’m saying I won. I’ll leave that for others to say.

Somewhere after our huge 2012 stage musical blowout The Last Prom, myself and the other guys from PROM decided that the most subversive move we could make was to become a straight-up rock band. It’s four years later and we’ve had a great time in the arcane world of ‘venues’, ‘support acts’ and ‘load-in times’, but we’ve decided that it would now be fun to go back to our theatre-y cabaret-y full-costumed roots.

The obvious way to draw a line under our Normal Band Phase was to release an actual record, which we did live on stage at The Phoenix the other night. We made it a triple-record launch alongside a couple of awesome acts from Sydney (Imperial Broads and Richard Cuthbert). Weirdly, or perhaps inevitably, it was the best gig we’ve ever played.

It was Julia’s idea to release on cassette, and while I default to be militantly anti-physical-media I knew that JJ could be relied on to make something that looked really fucking cool, which is a thing I certainly care about. Truth be told, when I finally borrowed my girlfriend’s 90s-vintage Walkman and had a listen it was pretty wonderful to wallow in everything I’d long forgotten about the format (like being able to hear the ghost of Side B when you get to the end of Side A).

It could definitely be argued that cassette  is the ultimate medium for these particular songs, a batch that includes ‘No-One Can Hear My Love’, the track that Luke described as my most melodramatic yet. He of all people knows what he’s saying when he says that.